The 2019 World Police & Fire Games will be held in Chengdu, China, from August 8 – August 18.
Please see the attached flyer for uniform athlete packages. Athlete packages include jumpsuit top and bottom, polo shirt, dry fit t-shirt, hat, shorts and a duffel bag. Athlete packages are to insure everyone participating in the 2019 World Police & Fire Games looks professional and coordinated while representing the FDNY.
Orders must be placed no later than July 1, 2019. For participating athletes with proof of registration, packages will cost $125. For non-participants that wish to order an athletic package, the cost is $250. Payment must be received before your order is placed. Payment will be accepted electronically via Venmo (information will be given out when order is requested) or via check made out to Uniformed Firefighters Association and mailed to: UFA Office of the Recording Secretary 204 E 23rd Street 5th Floor New York, NY 10010
To place your order, contact Antoinette Fatone at afatone@ufanyc.org or 212-545-6974. Have size information and 2019 World Police & Fire Games registration number available. There will be no deadline extension, so be sure to place your order as soon as possible.
Pick-up of the athlete packages is expected to be the last week of July at Fort Totten.
Certain Hospitals No Longer Accepting Empire Blue Cross / Blue Shield Please be advised that certain hospitals are no longer accepting FDNY’s Blue Cross / Blue Shield coverage. Westchester Medical Center and Bon Secours Charity Health System Facilities are currently out of the Empire Blue Cross / Blue Shield Network. As a result of failed contract negotiations, the following hospitals are no longer active in the Blue Cross / Blue Shield Network: Westchester Medical Center*Mid-Hudson Regional Hospital of Westchester*Good Samaritan Hospital in SuffernSt. Anthony’s Hospital in WarwickBon Secours Community Hospital in Port JervisWestchester Medical Center Advanced Physician GroupBon Secours Charity Health System Physician Group * Medicare is not impacted by this termination for Westchester Medical Center & Mid-Hudson Regional Hospital of Westchester Note that emergency care services at Westchester Medical Center and Mid-Hudson Regional Hospital will continue to be covered in accordance with your Empire benefit plan. Refer to the attached letter that was sent to all Blue Cross / Blue Shield participants for further details, frequently asked questions, and alternate facilities.
By Anthony McIntyre welcomes the decision to halt vindictive police proceedings against investigative journalists, Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey.
the police tell lies, they scheme and they manipulate. Every word they say, every line and sentence of every communication should be interrogated and challenged. Look behind their assertions and often you will find they are haphazard, incompetent and quite literally just making it up as they go along in the hope no one will challenge them. The emperor quite often has no clothes – Jamie Bryson
An alternative title considered for this piece was Judge Tells Thieving Bastards To Fuck Off. It would hardly have been inappropriate given the circumstances pertaining to this case where Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey had their homes raided and their journalistic material seized. Decorum prevailed over sentiment, so the more mundane option made it to the top of the page.
Nevertheless, decorum diminishes absolutely nothing about the mala fides the British police brought to this intimidation dressed up as investigation. Birney and McCaffrey called it right:
The police have dropped the case for one reason only – finally, they accept that by arresting us and raiding our homes and offices, they were the ones that acted unlawfully … The PSNI put the cudgel in the hands of Durham constabulary and let them loose on us and on press freedom itself.
The British police, whether based in Belfast or Birmingham – it makes no difference – will lie through their teeth. The cover up surrounding the unlawful killings of 96 supporters of Liverpool FC at Hillsborough in 1989, has taught us to be wary of anything they say about everything. There they lied from day one and are still lying thirty years on. There is just nobody out there left to believe them any more. Police ranks brim with chronic liars from constable to chief constable. The courts in Belfast have loudly told them where to go and it is most welcome to hear.
I have never found cause to have much faith in courts, believing in the old Belfast barrister quip that, that if you want justice go to a brothel, if you want screwed go to a court. But on this occasion, the court upheld the principle of journalistic privilege and protected the right to free inquiry, absolutely vital to any society purporting to be democratic and transparent.
Free inquiry was so essential to the wellbeing of the project both journalists were involved in. They had investigated the loyalist massacre of 6 men in a Loughinisland bar in 1994 – in a way the lying police had not – where there was extensive state forces collusion with the gunmen. The journalists subsequently produced a documentary. No Stone Unturned. A furious PSNI, already baleful towards the ombudsman Michael Maguire, were further enraged that journalists too should get uppity. Enraged that the RUC reputation was once again in tatters, the PSNI in consort with Durham Constabulary took aggressive and invasive action. “Rather than follow up leads in the documentary, police targeted the journalists.” The British police desperately wanted to drag their probing work down a judicial cul de sac and suffocate it.
Incredibly they said they did so in order to protect those unfortunate enough to have become involved in killing people. In their view investigative journalism had lives “put in danger for merely having the misfortune of being involved in terrorist atrocities at whatever level.” Well, bless my cotton socks, and pardon me Lord for ever having thought the British police lacked compassion for loyalist killers. I am left to feel discriminated against.
This “staggering proposition” and “warped mindset” might be newly expressed but it is most certainly not a newly found empathy for people they had long officially called terrorist killers. It was always there. What wasn’t there was the aggressive stupidity with which the sentiment was expressed.
The barrister for the targeted journalists concisely caught the police motive in his presentation to the court:
This was the kind of operation associated with a police state rather than with a liberal democracy that has laws to protect journalists so that they can fulfil their proper function of holding governments to account.
Intimidation, and no other, was the purpose of the arrests.
For the PSNI, it was a humiliating climbdown and means they might actually now have to do something to find those behind the Loughinisland killings.
Meanwhile, it is Victory to the Commentariat!
Last week, a report leaked of a briefing in which President Trump learned of polling by his team that showed that he trails Joe Biden in 11 states vital to his 2020 election strategy. Rather than approach the information as a valuable tool or as a moment to recalibrate strategy, Trump reportedly told his aides to deny that the internal polling existed.
When that didn’t work, Trump axed the pollsters who’d provided him with the news. According to the New York Times, Trump aides have spent the past week or so trying to determine the source of the leak. Per the codes of the current White House, this made the problem worse: “Aides violated a long-held unofficial rule of campaigns not to comment publicly on internal polling, even if the numbers leak.” Campaign manager Brad Parscale has now reportedly removed several pollsters.
Trump, a stickler for one-way loyalty, has reportedly retained two poll experts who’ve been around since at least 2016. Tony Fabrizio, a pickup by Paul Manafort who worked on some of his efforts in Ukraine, has remained with the campaign despite an incident in 2016 when the Trump campaign tried to stiff him on a $767,000 bill for his services. John McLaughlin, who did unofficial work for Trump when he flirted with a run in 2011, will stay on as well. On the cutting floor are Adam Geller, who previously worked for Chris Christie, and Michael Baselice, who worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger — two politicians the president has had public spats with. Also let go was Kellyanne Conway’s former firm. Some aides told the Times that “the president appeared to be using the episode to undermine” Conway, who now serves as White House counselor.
It’s easy to see why Trump tried to dismiss the release of the information as “fake polls.” In Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — states vital to the president’s 2016 win and his 2020 strategy — Trump was behind Biden by double digits. Voters in Georgia, a reliably red state, favored Biden by six points. Voters in Minnesota, which Trump has targeted as an aspirational state, seem beyond reach, as he’s down 14 points.
In an immediate sense, these general polls are alarming for the president: His own team determined that his map to reelection could lead nowhere. (Also concerning for the campaign is his choice to ignore the information: General polling is essential for gauging voter interest and testing out where to invest resources.) But generals over a year out from the big day are historically worthless as a method of prediction, as FiveThirtyEight noted in 2015: “If you look at polls that tested the eventual Democratic and Republican nominees in the last two months of the year before the election, the average absolute error of the polling average is 10.6 percentage points.” To put it another way, Trump is currently trailing five Democratic candidates, according to a Fox News poll released Sunday, with a ten-point margin separating him and Biden. That’s better than four years ago, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton by 17 points.
